IntroductionThe killing of off-duty soldier Lee Rigby on May 22nd , 2013, in Woolwich, UK, overshadowed completely the NSA scandal that came out around the same time. The revelations by journalist Glenn Greenwald-through thousands of documents leaked by the former security company employee1 Edward Snowden-that massive surveillance operations are being carried out by the NSA in the US and GCHQ in the UK, shows that there is no place to hide,2 to borrow from the title of Greenwald's book. The transnational Islamic political group, Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) Britain's leader Imran Waheed spoke on this issue a couple of weeks later-at a half-day event organized by HT, which seeks to establish an Islamic State in the Muslim world through ideological (non-violent) struggle, in East London-stating that Prism (the clandestine surveillance program under which the United States National Security Agency [NSA] collects internet communications from at least nine major US internet companies) is not just being used to monitor Muslims, but everyone. I argue that today's monitoring of Muslims goes hand in hand with the notion of the need for Islamic reform (or, put differently, the reformation of Muslims).

Muslims across the board have internalized the (Western) logic of the need to reform, and cannot help but do so, given the ways in which (dominant) discourses function, that is, they go into creating people's everyday sense(s) of being, living, and thinking-as a type of self-surveillance, even as many abjure the notion of reform, as the ideas of the need for "reformation" and "enlightenment" constitute the modern Western "unconscious of knowledge:3' I examine Imran Waheed's criticisms of British governmental (media-political) pressures on Muslims to reform, and the "Marrakech Declaration,"4 where "hundreds of Muslim scholars and intellectuals from over 120 countries, along with representatives of Islamic and international organizations, as well as leaders from diverse religious groups and nationalities, gathered in Marrakesh ... to reaffirm the principles of the Charter of Medina:5' I also examine a conversation between the director of the "anti-extremism think tank," The Quilliam Foundation, Maajid Nawaz, and Sam Harris-one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism" alongside Richard Dawkins, Daniel Denet, and the late Christopher Hitchens-published as Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue,6 in which the question of the need for Islamic reform is front and center.

Absolute power, as they say, corrupts absolutely. There is a reason why power corrupts. It deludes us into thinking we are the reference, we are all that we are because of our own doing. We become to a certain degree gods unto ourselves. The most powerful rulers through history, the most powerful rulers contemporary—and few and far between are those who never abused their powers—all of these people assumed at some level that they were and are indomitable, and that they are in some ways God’s gift to his people. And it usually is the case that these figures were and are men.

Every so often, allegations emerge about famous Muslim celebrity-scholars abusing their power—although, in the case of Nouman Ali Khan, the details are still murky (and in some ways the details don’t matter too much if an abuse of power has occurred). When Muslim celebrity-scholars abuse their power they in a very real sense scar the community, and this applies to any religious community of course—whether Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, or New Age.

Myanmar is a non-secular Buddhist majority country. The majority of Myanmar peoples are Buddhist, including both ethnic Burmans and non-Burman ethnic minorities. Buddhists make up 89.8 percent of the population, Christians 6.3 percent and Muslims 2.3 percent. In the contemporary climate of Myanmar, Many Buddhists see Islam as a threat to Buddhism; they use Bangladesh, Indonesia and Afghanistan as examples of Islam’s takeover of previously Buddhist majority locations.

Myanmar was born out of the ashes of the murder of its integrationist freedom fighter leader General Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi. He was assassinated on July 19, 1947, a few months before the independence of Burma on January 4, 1948. His legacy of seeking integration and the violence associated with his murder still alludes Myanmar today. These research notes witll set forth the history of Muslims in Mynamar as in attempt to understand the contemporary exclusion of the Rohingya from the modern nation-state of Mynamar and to argue for the continued failure of Myanmar to become a multicultural society of ethnoreligious equality and plurality.​

​This book asks the critical question, how did we get here, to this place of hijab bans and outlawed minarets, secret renditions of enemy combatants, Abu Ghraib, and GTMO? It is not simply a result of September 11, 2001, Madrid 2004, or London 2005, nor a culmination of events of the past decade or the past century. Terrorist attacks, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the increased movement of Muslim immigrants into north­ern and western Europe, and the visibility of Islam, in general have contributed to a voicing of "the Muslim problem." However, these concerns represent old anxieties that lie within a multiplicity of times and spaces on the pages of manuscripts and canvases of paintings, in works of great drama, poetry, and fiction, within travel diaries and government documents, and on the screens of movie theaters. To find the answer to the question posed here, we must look at numerous fields of cultural produc­tion; there, we find a vision of Islam that is both familiar and unsettling. Within it, we must seek what is common. What is common is the Muslim monster.

The history of monsters is a subject addressed in several disciplines, among them history, theology, and religious studies. In this study, I will argue that imaginary Muslim ,monsters have determined the construction of the Muslim in Western thought. At times, these constructions have involved fantasies about Jewish and African bodies; ,at other times, they have reacted to anxieties surrounding categories beyond race-in particular, those related to religion, gender, and sexuality. To be clear, I am interested here in raising an awareness of these creatures-demons, giants, cannibals, vampires, zombies, and other monsters-that can help us understand the status of Muslims today as stock characters in the Western imaginary landscape. The character of the homicidal terroristic Muslim stalks the Western social imaginary in print media, television, and film, but he has ancestors.

If, as Talal Asad reminds us (2003:169), Islam is the primary alter of Europe, then “Muslim” is the site of that primary alterity. Alterity is the meeting place of two opposites, not just one. It is where the Other’s signal quality – whether irrationality or backwardness or fundamentalism or religion – gives rise to the very quality of the Other’s Other (that is Europe). The “I” and “us” and “we” of Europe, and of Euro-American provenance, reflects into itself, by means of the Other, qualities – whether rationality or progress or enlightenment or secularism – that are essential to its identity (since the Hegelian master is constituted out of the slave’s recognition, in a dual movement). What I am saying is a re-articulation of the some of the ideas that have gone before us to take account of our present moment in history (as we know, a la Foucault, that every new historical period is configured by specific conditions of possibility that have continuities and discontinuities with the past). Euro-America cannot conceive of its central (imaginary) qualities without its Other. Euro-America (whose Other gives birth to these qualities from its hapless bosom) depends on its very existence – philosophically, ideologically, existentially – on its Other. Euro-America’s very identity is based on acts of Othering.

Now, to consider for a moment the history of this binarized approach to the world, it is rooted in the modern approach to knowledge and to the self. The modern self is derived from Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. When Descartes declared “I think, therefore I am,” which followed from his radical skepticism, he declared his own self as the source of all knowledge. This was in contrast to a premodern understanding of the self as being rooted in God as “the ground of Being,” whereby there was a fundamental inseparability of the known, the knower, and knowledge (Nasr 1989:49).Descartes marked the modern break of the object from the subject and the birth of the modern self. According to Heidegger “at the heart of [Western] modernity is the rise of an absolute subjectivity, such that the world appears to man as if it were ‘for’ him […] as picture” (Seth 2007:67) - that is, as an externalization.